Ugly U.S. Capitol Attack Reflects Ugly Present — And Possibly Uglier Future
By NBP Editorial Board | January 7, 2021, 14:23 EST
It’s hard to see what a fraction of Trump supporters thought they might accomplish by storming the U.S. Capitol.
Whatever it was, they didn’t accomplish it, and they did much harm. People are dead. A sitting body of public servants has been disrupted and threatened. Order has been diminished.
And the Left is sure to use the incident to political and social advantage.
Violence is unacceptable. It’s wrong. It was wrong when left-wingers attacked people and businesses in many of our cities throughout much of 2020. It’s wrong when Trump supporters attacked the building that houses our country’s federal legislature on Wednesday.
It’s also bad politics. It was never going to get Donald Trump another four years in the White House. That could have happened only if state legislatures in key battleground states had asserted themselves when election results looked suspicious, or if judges in various courts had decided to follow state and federal constitutions when it comes to election law, or if local election officials had decided to strictly scrutinize signatures on mailed-in or harvested ballots.
The Left won the 2020 presidential election not on November 3, but during the months of May, June, July, and August, when they implemented fraud-friendly mail-everybody-a-ballot schemes. They won it through early voting, in which millions of people voted before ever hearing about Joe Biden’s troubling ties to the Communist Party of China. They won it by burying sad facts about Biden’s honesty, integrity, and mental competence. They also won it in the aftermath, with dubious days-after-the-fact voting counting and see-no-evil court rulings.
Millions of Americans who voted for Donald Trump are rightly disgusted with the failed election of 2020. They’re also rightly disgusted with the Democratic Left’s plans to dismantle American institutions and culture. The Left-Right divide in America these days is not so much over how high taxes should be or how many services government should provide or how much money should be spent on national defense. It’s between people who love America and want to see all Americans prosper; and people who hate America and want to see their enemies suffer.
But the vast majority of Americans of all political beliefs have no use for violence. The Left’s attacks on statues, public buildings, businesses, and police in 2020 were unpopular. So is yesterday’s attack on the U.S. Capitol, and rightly so.
Whenever a jarring event occurs, though, it’s important to look immediately for what reactions – and over-reactions – might be coming. An early test of Democratic rule in Washington is coming up soon.
Will Democrats try to stop the annual March for Life on Friday, January 29? It’s the most peaceful, joyous, and loving mass-rally in the country. Demonstrators don’t harass anybody or threaten anybody. They pray, they sing, and they march, in the best of causes, trying to persuade their fellow countrymen that unborn babies have a right to be born and prosper.
It’s also the largest anti-violence gathering in the world. People who attend oppose the violence of abortion.
To be sure, the March for Life is an embarrassing display for public officials who hold the ugliest of views – that babies’ lives don’t matter. That includes most elected Democrats. But one of our enduring principles in America is that we don’t use the government to censor people whose opinions we disagree with – even if those people shame us by their witness.
If Democrats use fake concerns about security to try to limit or scuttle the March for Life, we will know that tyranny is at hand.